Sunday, February 27, 2011

InvisibleIsland





This video experiment is based on a short piece of mine, "on an island otherwise invisible,” which appeared in Chapter Seven of The Anemone Sidecar. You may see the original here: http://ravennapress.com/anemonesidecar/chapters.html

I don't know why, but the video seems a little cropped to one side here on blogspot. To see it in full, you might want to go to full screen mode, or hop over to my Youtube account at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W80011fHKc

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

my various short fiction publications

I realized I ought to post links to some of short fiction publications.

here's one:

Ghost. Dog. Virgin.

http://751contents2.wordpress.com/issue-2/tucker/

Sunday, February 20, 2011

I get nominated for an award...that I can't get

Interesting development.

As you know, I teach at Northeastern. Well, the other day, one of my students past or present (I don’t know which one), nominated me for the school’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

(Cheer!)

Except, it turns out that the award is only open to full time employees. I, like most of the people who now teach at Universities, am a part timer, or, as they say, “a member of adjunct staff.”

(Argh!)

So, if you’re reading this, and you’re the student who nominated me, thank you humongously.

If, however, you’re reading this, and you’re the official who aced me outta the running for being a part time employee…well, gee, golly..

Would you mind terribly if I admitted to hoping you get rectal Gonorrhea? In your left nostril?

Just saying…

Tiger Mothers...

I’ve not said anything yet about this new book on “tiger mothers.” I don’t plan to do so now, either.

Except for one little observation.

You know…and I know… everyone knows…

If the same book had been written not by a rich, successful, female Asian-American Yale Law professor but rather by a working class white woman in a trailer park…

She’d be in jail for child abuse before you could hum three verses of "Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer."

Happy Birthday to me

It was my birthday on Thursday. I’m now officially 54 years old.

And I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.

People Power in the Middle East...and the world

So, like everyone else in the known universe, I’ve been watching with real fascination while the peoples of the Middle East suddenly began turning out their dictators. First, it was Tunisia, then Egypt, and now half the nations of the Arab world (plus Iran!) are in the midst of People Power-style rebellions. Some will succeed, others will doubtlessly fail, but that the rebellions are happening at all is amazing.

Also, like everyone else, I’ve wondered what it all means. I’ve come up with a few random thoughts, which (out of the goodness of my heart) I’ll share with you…

1) People Power rocks. We’ve seen it, now, in the Philippines in '86, Eastern Europe '89, and Russia after that....now the Arab world. (Of course, Russia is now fairly authoritarian, but it is still a far cry from Stalin's USSR.)

So, could this be the beginning of an age of People Power? An age when states the world over will be shaped, re-shaped, and then re-re-shaped by exactly such manifestations of the popular will? If so, is it a new form of democracy? One in which the population really does "vote with its feet"?

So far, these have been genuine revolutions. Most revolutions aren't. Most of the time they are disguised coups in which one segment of the elite seizes power from another segment of the elite (even Lenin's revolution was just exactly that. A group of middle class and upper class intellectuals moved into a power vacuum).

But not so here. In Tunisia, in Egypt, and now in Libya, this really is the people in the streets. That suggests we are entering an age when ordinary folk the world over will increasingly be the significant political actors, at least in moments of crisis. Yes, the elites and their administrators will always run things, but they will have to do so with at least one eye on the public. In other words, a lot of places will be less like Greece under the colonels, and more like France after '68.

2) Our own elites need to be paying attention. That's not because I expect a People Power revolution here (although, if we don't get our jobless rate down below 10%, and soon, there may be one). But, even so, the Middle Eastern revolutions are important because they are going to reshape the way our "allies" and dependents will behave. We, or, rather our elites will have to learn to treat them with respect rather than as banana republics.

3) Also, sort of on the same note, there are potentially three big losers here. The first two are obvious, the US and Israel. The US will never have quite the same sort of leverage in the Middle East again. Israel is losing important (if usually covert) connections. But, in the long run, I don't think it will hurt the average American much. It might even improve relations with the Arab world once we're no longer backing tyrants. (Israel...I'm not so sure about.)

The third big loser might be unexpected: Iran. I am convinced that this is going to wound the dominant parties there rather badly.

Egypt's was a secular revolution, just as was the one in Tunisia. Which means that it is no longer just the Islamists who are fighting the system. In fact, the Islamists have failed time and time again to topple even one Arab government. Now, the secularists have brought down the biggest of all.

This is not to say that the Islamists couldn't seize power in Egypt. However, they have lost forever the image of being the only effective popular force in the Arab world.

5) When I say that the US could suffer because of the Revolution, I mean it. This might spell the end of the age of cheap (or, at least, less expensive) oil.

On the other hand, that might also mean that we finally have to sit down and come up with alternatives to the oil-economy. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

6) And finally…

Another reason our elites should be watching closely: the rich and powerful have acted in recent years as though they didn’t need to bother their pretty little heads about old fashioned things like nations. They were the new Global people who went wherever profits were highest and the hotels were most luxurious. If America got difficult, no problem, they'd just head for somewhere else -- which is why expats pack the beaches of Dubai, and companies like Halliburton fill its office towers.

But, guess what? Dubai is now shaking in its Guccis. Increasingly, there is no high ground, no favored place where the rich and powerful can go when things get hot elsewhere. Trouble will follow them. They can neither run nor hide.

If we're lucky, they'll be bright enough to see that.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Civil War





And another of the video lectures I'm giving my US History class.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

thoughts on motion comics

Something else on my mind. I've recently run across the concept of the "motion comic." This is a new thing. It is like a comic, but electronic. It includes graphics, but also some "limited" animation, plus voice and music.

The big names, as you would expect, in motion comics are the major comic book companies -- Marvel for example. Though, I suppose that could change. New players always coming into the world.

What confuses me, though, is that motion comics are being sold as a completely new medium -- not cartoons, not graphic novels, but something alien and new,

Yet, when I look at them (and there are a bunch on the web), I'm struck by the fact that their "limited" animation looks pretty unlimited to me. Yes, they don't move all the time, but they boast at least as much animation as a lot of the TV cartoons I watched in my long lost boyhood. They have at least as much some of the Hanna-Barbera productions (take a look at Space Ghost) and a 'ell of a lot more than, say, "Space Angel."

If you haven't seen Space Angel, by the way, it is worth a glance, if only for the sheer weirdness of it (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Angelf). The Angel is sort of an interstellar policeman and secret agent who's always rushing about saving the universe.

A product of Cambria Productions, the show was a mix of cartooning and live action. So, for example, rather than drawing a moving mouth when a character spoke, the animators filmed an actor's lips and then pasted those on the face of the cartoon.

It was truly bizarre, and in retrospect, one of the creepier things I've ever watched on TV. Yet, I'm embarrassed to say I was a big fan at the time. Of course, I was four years old, but, still…

Anyway, my point is that I wonder if motion comics are really a separate art form, or merely the first step toward animation. Meaning that, eventually, the graphic novel and the comic, per se, will ultimately merge completely with full motion cartoons.


motion comics at Marvel

Space Angel on Youtube

"The Gathering Storm"

The Mexican-American War

lectures for classes

Hello, Everyone,

Haven't posted much recently. Usual reason. Life is ...complicated. We run and run and run and, like Alice's Queen, just stay in the same spot.

But, if you're interested at all, I'm still posting my class lectures to youtube. I'll try to post a couple of them.

cheers
mjt